Following ‘Hamilton’
Inspired by the hit musical, Houston family embarks on an East Coast road trip
NEW YORK — If Aaron Burr found peace at the end of his caustic 80 years, his death mask doesn’t show it. Death masks are macabre by nature, but Burr’s — a replica of which is on display at the New York Historical Society — is particularly grotesque, the corners of his mouth ripping downward into an unsettling grimace, and his nose bent rigidly to the right. The tormented topography of his face befits a complicated man who lived a complicated life of distinction, disappointment and heartbreak. Burr’s story and that of Alexander Hamilton intertwine through the three hours of the runaway hit Broadway musical “Hamilton,” which last week earned a record 16 Tony Award nominations, and has already won a Grammy, as well as a Pulitzer for its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Hamilton” celebrates its titular character, while acknowledging some of his many flaws. But Burr isn’t conveniently relegated to the role of villain. Instead Burr’s the story’s narrator, Hamilton’s conflicted counterpart — ill-fated differently than the man he killed. The musical isn’t concerned with good versus evil, but rather the nature of legacy. Orphaned by brilliant and well-to-do parents, Burr’s burden becomes protecting a familial legacy. Today his tall but simple tombstone in Princeton shows wear from 180 New Jersey winters. A penniless immigrant without a family, Hamilton in the show hopes to build his own legacy from scratch knowing he may not live to see it revealed. “What is a legacy?” he sings. “It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”
Hamilton’s grave remains pristine and white. Today it draws increasing traffic to Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, steps away from the financial system that sprung from seeds Hamilton helped plant.
“Hamilton” draws from Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography, which is to say it aspires to historical accuracy as often as the structure of a musical narrative allows.
A 2015 performance of “Hamilton” piqued the interest of my daughter, whose affinity for U.S. history was
previously thin. With three hours of music and questions about some of these characters, we set out on a week-long road trip seeking some further context about the birth of a nation. The stops were enlightening and frustrating in what they reveal about America then and now.
And chasing some of the founding fathers provided a historical crash course that school textbooks simply don’t provide.
Take Burr: The compression of American history in schools does him no favors. He was an abolitionist and supported women’s right to vote. He was also indicted for murder and charged with treason. He was a widower with an affinity for prostitutes. He had a parentless childhood, orphaned at 2. And he outlived his one child, a daughter who was lost at sea before she turned 30. His life was brilliantly tragic, which is why years later Burr provides the driving narrative voice in a hit musical that bears the name of the political enemy he killed.
BBB George Washington’s dentures are on display at his Mount Vernon home in Alexandria, Va. They were made of wood. These two truths I knew from childhood, but only one of them was true. Such is the nature of history when imperfect beings document and disseminate it.
Washington’s false teeth are indeed at Mount Vernon. But they were actually made from a patchwork of human, horse and cow teeth as well as pieces of ivory.
Even the phrase “Founding Fathers” carries a range of interpretation. At least two guides on our travels affirmed historian Richard B. Morris’ designation of seven primary Founding Fathers: Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Hamilton and John Jay. The four presidents and a famed statesman/inventor are ubiquitous.
Hamilton, shot and killed by Burr at age 49, hasn’t until recently enjoyed the same regard; John Jay clearly could benefit from some pop cultural interest.
The least opaque character in the musical, Washington provides a strong and noble presence from his entrance as the general of the Continental Army to his voluntary retirement as president. Not surprisingly he was a player at destinations throughout our trip: Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where both the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were debated and adopted; the Ford Mansion, America’s first national historical park, in Morristown, N.J., where Washington headquartered during the unrelenting winter of 1779-1780; Manalapan, N.J., where Gen. Charles Lee’s disastrous retreat during the Battle of Monmouth nearly doomed the American forces, who nevertheless fought to a bloody stalemate; Federal Hall in New York City, where Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States; Fraunces Tavern, also in downtown Manhattan, where Washington bid farewell to the officers in the Continental Army after the revolution.
But Mount Vernon was the logical first stop, because Washington makes for a logical first stop, even on a “Hamilton” tour.
Mount Vernon’s
grounds are gorgeous with ample space for kids to run around before and after visiting the mansion. The museum is among the best designed and outfitted among presidential destinations I’ve visited. Even then, one of the smallest pieces on display is the most profound. Inside the home, encased in glass on a wall, is a large iron key to the Bastille sent to Washington by the Marquis de Lafayette — who provided crucial leadership and French aid during the American Revolution.
Washington treasured what he called the “token of victory by liberty over despotism.” Yet three years later, the president and his cabinet opted for neutrality in France’s conflict with England.
Turns out you can’t have your Freedom Fries and eat them, too. Absolutes make for bracing rhetoric and unkept promises.
His status as slaveholder isn’t addressed in the musical — it is at Mount Vernon. But more on that in a moment.
Jefferson’s Monticello sits high on a hill in Charlottesville, Va., just a couple of hours south of Mount Vernon. The mansion has been admirably preserved, though a ladybug infestation and numerous spider webs hint at the unrelenting nature of nature and the difficulty involved with the upkeep of centuries-old homes. On the subject of legacy, Jefferson’s head stone makes no mention of his presidency, instead first referencing his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Commentary about his historical relevance has largely been left to other institutions; the emphasis at Monticello is on Monticello.
About 20 minutes north in Orange, Va., James Madison’s Montpelier has benefitted from a more recent preservation effort. Bought more than 100 years ago by the DuPont family, Montpelier suffered an assault of affluent gaudiness as its original 22 rooms were suffocated by another 23. (Expansion: the billionaire’s manner of marking territory.)
But a five-year restoration that began in 2003 recently restored the home to its original design. Among the Founding Fathers on our itinerary, Madison is the one about which I knew the least, and while he’s framed humorously at times in the musical as Jefferson’s sickly sidekick, the staff at Montpelier
proudly present him as a sickly Constitutional genius who did his big thinking while looking out the window of his upstairs office.
Madison in particular thought long and hard about democracy, expressing concern that the “majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.”
Information today moves at a pace unimaginable then, which allows it to be processed and spun and allowed to provoke joy and outrage instantly. But the debates discussed at these museums — the ones that inform “Hamilton” — sound quite familiar: the size of government and whether power should rest with states or the federal government, issues of debt, foreign relations.
At Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a guide asks one family at a time to call out where they’re visiting from: Florida, Iran, Sweden, New York, Japan, Oklahoma, Germany, England. “Republic of Texas.”
Eye rolling, it turns out, is a universal language.
Spare, wooden with ample echo, the spaces inside Independence Hall possess a hallowed vibe, perhaps because what was accomplished there required resolution for so many disparate conflicts. It was a place of imperfect hope, not rigid ultimatums. Bright minds gathered to produce something new and functional, but with leeway to improve its functionality.
And these were fallible men, make no mistake about it, as the hypocrisy of slave owners debating issues of freedom is robust.
Two of the three Virginians are called out in “Hamilton” for their source of labor. All three of the Virginia presidential homes address slavery more directly than they did years ago. Even still, the language of regret varies from stop to stop. All text at Mount Vernon uses “enslaved” as an adjective to describe a person: A subtle distinction, but one that made slavery an external condition and not an innate state of being. Language that sought to underplay the conditions of life in slavery has also largely been deserted. Even at their best, living conditions for enslaved workers were horrid. And that’s not even accounting for the whole absence of freedom part.
Accounts at the three homes suggest the Virginians found slave ownership an uneasy necessity to keep a financial infrastructure
from collapsing.
Enlightenment, in this case, came with an asterisk.
Hamilton’s father split when he was a kid. Then his mother died. A hurricane destroyed the island in the Caribbean where he grew up. He was in every way a kid without a home.
So he made his home in America, more specifically New York. The Grange, a house located in Harlem in upper Manhattan remains the definitive Hamilton destination. Like Hamilton, the Grange has its own remarkable survival story, having been moved twice. The first time the home was relocated by horse and cart. More recently it was lifted over a neighboring church and safely planted on 141st Street in a green space that once would have been owned by Hamilton.
Fans of the musical will likely find a knot in their throats upon seeing the piano Hamilton’s wife and son would have played together.
Just 20 blocks north is the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Miranda did some writing for his musical there, and may have spent more time in the home than Burr ever did. Burr moved into the house — which years earlier served as Washington’s headquarters — after marrying its owner, a wealthy widow. His effort to be on the up and up again failed after a few months when Eliza Jumel divorced Burr after he burned through too much of her money.
A home Jefferson rented in lower Manhattan while serving as Washington’s secretary of state is long gone, but a plaque marks the site of the musical’s “room where it happened.” There, in 1790, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton reached a compromise that salvaged Hamilton’s ambitious and controversial financial plan — in which the debts of a new and financially scrapped nation were paid in full — while settling upon a Southern and agrarian locale for the nation’s capitol.
If the Grange was Hamilton’s corporeal home, lower Manhattan represents the legacy of his mind. Traces of Hamilton abound in the Wall Street area, most notably the Museum of American Finance has an entire room dedicated to the man who built the country’s financial system from scratch. Business, they say, has been brisk.
Even then, Hamilton’s historical standing drifted toward obscurity — to the point where he was nearly booted from the $10 bill. “America forgot him,” goes a line in the musical.
But Chernow’s book and Miranda’s musical renewed interest in Hamilton. And because he held such inextricable relationships — good and bad — with other figures like Washington, Madison, Jefferson and Burr, they moved to the fore with him.
BBB A “Hamilton” performance would have provided a sufficient conclusion to the trip, and the show was a reminder that the telling of history can be both dynamic and thoughtful. But one more stop required attention.
We wake at dawn and drive to Weehawken, which seems like a fitting and poetic end to the week’s travel. A biting wind whips along the Palisades, the cliffs that run along the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. Positioned so high, Weehawken possesses perhaps the finest view of Manhattan, the island’s north/south expanse from Washington Heights to Battery Park densely visible. Two-hundred years ago the same vantage would have offered less to see. The river bank simply provided a space for men to disagree in a now antiquated manner with a fledgling city in the distance.
Hamilton rowed across the Hudson with his second, Judge Nathaniel Pendleton, and Dr. David Hosack. There, he and Burr ended their feud.
A marker mentions a few other prominent duelists like former New York governor DeWitt Clinton. “All came to Weehawken to defend their honor,” it reads, “according to the custom of the day.”
Remember that when considering the infallibility of the founders and framers. Some customs are best left behind.
Three years before Hamilton’s death, his son was killed in a duel at the same location — with the same set of pistols. A replica set can be viewed at the New York Historical Society. Seeing the originals requires making a friend at the JP Morgan Chase headquarters in Manhattan, where the pistols are displayed but not open to the public.
The actual dueling grounds were close to the river’s edge, but when train tracks were placed there in the 1800s the rock where Hamilton allegedly rested after being wounded was moved.
“History obliterates in every picture it paints,” Burr sings in the musical.
Their dispute ended Hamilton’s life and Burr’s career, though he lived another 30 years, some of it spent on pathetic pursuits like starting his own nation and marrying a wealthy widow to refill his dwindling coffers.
So the feet of a successful attorney who served as vice president and senator are instead stuck in the banks of a river in New Jersey, where he won a duel and lost his place in history. His and Hamilton’s form of debate doesn’t really have winners.
Yet even there, Burr is the lesser inhabitant. A bronze bust of his adversary perches high on a column at the site, which is located by Hamilton Park. On Hamilton Avenue. In the show, Washington tells Hamilton, “You have no control: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”
That certainly is the case.
And Hamilton, near the end, refers to America as “that great unfinished symphony.”
That, too, rings true.